ROSE FORAN

grief

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 12:49:00 +0100

Lately I’ve been dipping into these moods that are heavier than my usual ones, which mostly result from the weird catalog of things that put me in a funk – like how I Never Really Know How I Feel About February, or feeling like I’m too far away from the edge of the earth or much too close to it.

These are the moods that tug on my spine, wanting it to return to the soil and be planted there, to remain forever perpendicular to the horizon. I treat them as unwelcome because they come out of nowhere and leave me incapable of putting my finger of their origins, something that’s inexplicably frustrating for me because I like to always have place cards ready for guests as they arrive to the dinner party in my heart.

And then I remember that I’m sad because I’m grieving, which, if you’ve ever experienced a loss, is something that is strange and cumbersome because each new grief is something that doesn’t quite translate the same way as the last, each grief comes with its own set of rules and etiquette: when it will manifest and how it will seize you and to what degree you will be paralyzed by it.

Grief comes as a heaviness in your knees; at least that’s how it starts. You feel it there first, which causes your ankles to wither, pulling you to the floor. You feel it - the heaviness, the sand in your shoes - and whether you’re on the way home from the market or changing metros at the busiest station in Paris, your only instinct is to drop to the ground and hold yourself and hold your heaviness.

I lost someone who was important to me a short while ago.

He was the man who gave me Bowie. I tried to honor his memory by listening to Oh! You Pretty Things and Quicksand and Ziggy Stardust, all of the songs I fell in love with and learned all the words to so we could sing them together and make the same mock-guitar strumming motion in all the right parts. But I didn’t know if it was an appropriate gesture, because I’ve never really felt the need to honor someone’s memory before – except maybe for Holocaust victims I’ve never met, or when I read the names of soldiers who have died in Iraq or Afghanistan in the New York Times: both of which I guess I honor by feeling sad and thinking intensely about how senseless a lot of things are, and then ultimately by feeling sad at the fact that I’m going to die too, someday.

I listened to all these songs that we would listen to in his Jaguar on the way to my grandparents’ house, the one that he loved so much but my mom convinced him to trade in for a Volvo because they were safer, even though I don’t think anyone can really love a Volvo as much as they can a Jaguar – especially not an Englishman. I listened to them – Changes and Life on Mars? and Five Years – until I felt something close to pain, because when I found out it he died it was more fact than feeling, it hadn’t quite yet completed its osmosis; hadn’t yet seeped into my knowing.

And then Starman came on, which was when it really hit me that he was a dead person and not a living one, that his name didn’t belong to anyone anymore – anyone real – but just to the idea of someone who once was funny in a corny way and kind to a fault, who once walked and drove and ate and drank and had functioning organs and whose blood would run out into the cracks of his skin if he ever were to cut himself accidentally.

So I thought about it some more and decided that I would honor his memory by trying to be kinder, which is something I always try to do, even though sometimes it sinks back into my Jar of Unattainable Emotions whenever I’m feeling frustrated or cynical or lost.

But then I thought about all of the things I didn’t tell him, how I failed to jump into the rapidly closing window between the time when he was real and the time he evaporated into a figment. No matter how much I say them now they will still be unsaid, because they didn’t hit his ears and translate back into his knowing when those were things that he still had, because people who are alive can do things like understand and feel and appreciate when you are honest with them.

So to honor his memory I decided I would tell people how I feel, because there is so much I should have told him that I didn’t, and these forever kind of regrets are the most impossible to rectify.

He was the closest thing to a father I’ve ever really had. I’m glad I told him that, and I hope he knew that I meant it – because I never asked him if he did, which in hindsight I wish I had because these are the kinds of things you want to make sure someone knows.

Eventually I’ll smile when I listen to Bowie instead of thinking about how he doesn’t exist anymore except in my memory, how senseless a lot of things are, and being sad about how I’m going to die too, eventually, one day.

Until then I can be kind. That’s something I can do.

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